The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow

by Patrick Quentin

  He had to get back. At once. Without losing a minute. It was the only possible thing. Somehow, without rousing Lorna’s suspicions, he would have to make a complete change of plan. But how?

  The solution came to him. It was so simple that he found his self-confidence completely restored. He’d been quite rattled for a moment. That wasn’t like him. Bruce Mendham never got rattled.

  He kissed Lorna’s cheek. “Baby, while you’re wallowing in your mail, I’ll call the Baintons and tell them we’re coming. They’re at the hotel.”

  He hurried downstairs and telephoned the hotel, leaving apologies for the Baintons and explaining that he and his wife had had to return unexpectedly to New York. He went back to the bedroom, arranging his face in a mask of rueful disappointment.

  “Lorna, darling, old Bainton had a mix-up. His wife had invited some people without telling him. I’m afraid the yacht’s full up.”

  “Oh, Bruce, how annoying.”

  “But, babe, I’ve got another idea. Bainton told me that Willie Stretz was in New York. You know, big oil man from Texas. A pal of mine. It’d be a cinch to borrow the five thousand from him. But Bainton said he’s leaving for Dallas tomorrow. The Emmetts wouldn’t think it rude of me, would they, if I pushed off to New York right now?”

  “Of course not, darling.” Lorna was smiling the wifely smile. Its doting adoration had always rather irritated him. “We’ll both leave this minute. I’ll write a note for Sylvia.”

  “There’s no need for you to come, too, sweetie.”

  “But I want to. I only said I was feeling better because I knew the yachting trip meant a lot to you. But now … Oh, Bruce, of course I’ll go with you. As if it’s any fun being anywhere without you!”

  Bruce looked at her, feeling the smug contentment of a much-loved man. Well, why not? In fact, it might be better to make the “discovery” with Lorna there as a witness.

  “Okay, baby. Pack your things. Let’s get out of this place as fast as possible.”

  As the car sped towards New York, Lorna was in an agony of suspense. She’d fooled him. Bruce thought he’d left the third check at the house—and he was rushing back to get it. Her plan had worked. But why had he raised so few objections to her coming with him? Was he that sure of himself? Did that mean Aunt Addy was…? She fought against the word that reared up in her mind. But didn’t it have to be that? Why else would he risk her presence?—Unless he was completely certain that he was safe, that Aunt Addy wouldn’t … wouldn’t be able to …

  The afternoon traffic was thick and tangled. Bruce was driving like a demon. Lorna struggled with despair. Everything was lost. No, no. She mustn’t feel that way. She had to go on hoping that every minute still counted, that every second that took them nearer to New York would somehow help Aunt Addy.

  With a wild movement the car swerved to the right, and a report sounded like a fired gun. The highway seemed to spin around them. Then in a screech of brakes and a wrenching of tires, the car jolted to a stop.

  “Blowout.”

  With a curse, Bruce jumped out. Shivering, Lorna climbed out, too, watching as he changed the wheel with feverish concentration. He had given up any attempt to hide his frenzied eagerness to get back to New York.

  So he thinks I’m that blind, she thought with the chilliness of complete disenchantment. He has this much contempt for my intelligence.

  They started once more their headlong rush to New York. Mile fled after mile. At last they crossed the East River and were snarled in the traffic of Fifty-ninth Street. Then Bruce was drawing the car up outside the house on Sutton Place.

  “Well, here we are. Pretty good time.”

  He was smiling his bland smile again as he helped her out onto the sidewalk. He thought he was going to win! He was still “handling” her, completely ignorant of the fact that she had the evidence to destroy him.

  The fool! she thought, above the jangle of her nerves. The fool!

  She stood close behind him as he opened the front door with his key. They went together into the empty hall. There was a weird howling, and the two starved Siamese cats hurtled out of the living room towards them. One of them leaped straight at Lorna. The suddenness of the attack caught her off balance. She lost her grip on her pocketbook. It fell forward onto the parquet floor, sprawling out its contents.

  In a second of freezing horror, she saw the check marked Forgery. It slid, face upward, to Bruce’s feet.

  Instantly she stooped to snatch it up, but even as she did so, she knew she was too late. Bruce had grabbed her wrist. He jerked her up so that she was standing immediately in front of him. His face, glaring down at her, was grey with understanding and fury.

  “You!” he said. “You!”

  Suddenly the panic she had been suppressing for hours was unleashed in her as hysteria, and she screamed: “Where’s Aunt Addy? What have you done to Aunt Addy?”

  He dragged her towards him, his fingers digging into the flesh of her arms: then, in an abrupt change of plan, he pushed her away. His face had completely collapsed. It was quivering and ashen and covered with sweat. He was fumbling in his pocket. He swept out his keys and brought them towards the brief case.

  The gun. Of course, the gun. Lorna threw herself at him, knocking the brief case sideways. He grabbed it again and lashed out at her with his fist. As she staggered backward, he inserted the key into the lock. She threw herself at him again. Dimly she was conscious of the wailing of the cats, rolling around her like an embodiment of her own hysteria.

  “Aunt Addy!” she cried. “Where is Aunt Addy?”

  She was clutching at him, scratching with her nails, biting into the sleeve of his coat, screaming. She could feel his arms crushing her, feel his hot, panting breath, rancid with brandy, as they struggled together in a nightmare embrace.

  And then, suddenly, as the last of her strength was ebbing from her, she felt him go limp and heavy in her grip. He tottered forward against her. Still screaming, she made an immense effort and tore herself from him as he lurched past her and collapsed onto the floor.

  She was shivering and whimpering. Tears of terror were blinding her eyes. She blinked and started. For a moment she couldn’t believe …

  There, in front of her, standing over Bruce, his face white and terrified, was little Joe Polansky. He had something in his hand. What was it? The little hand sanding machine …

  “Joe!”

  “I just come in to get the machines. I heard—”

  He broke off. He hadn’t looked up at her. He was staring down at the unconscious Bruce. Suddenly, with savage viciousness, he kicked him in the stomach. Then, jumping over him, he started running up the stairs.

  Lorna stumbled after him. “Joe!”

  His voice trailed down from above her, incoherent with hatred and rage.

  “He locked her in. I found a note in the furnace duct. He locked Mrs. Snow up in the vault.”

  Mrs. Snow was conscious of light and of things—arms?—twining around her, lifting her. There was motion. Was it the boat again? Was it Gordon? She could hear sounds, too—voices, but then, for a long time now, there had been voices. They weren’t really voices; she knew that. They were cats.

  There was something she had to say, something of vast importance that would save everything. But before she could say it, a great black sail slipped down from the mast and enveloped her.

  When she opened her eyes, almost twenty-four hours later, she was looking straight into Lorna’s face. How lovely to see Lorna! And the man standing behind her, wasn’t it old Dr. Garner?

  “Aunt Addy. Darling Aunt Addy, are you all right? The police have taken him away.”

  Him. Bruce. Mrs. Snow remembered everything now. But it didn’t matter. It was over.

  “Lorna, dear!” She felt a great sense of peace flooding through her. But there was still something on her mind. What was it? Oh, yes, of course. “Lorna, have the cats been fed?”

  “Yes, yes. The cats are fine.”

&
nbsp; Mrs. Snow brought her hand up from under the covers and laid it on her niece’s arm.

  “I was so worried about the cats,” she said.

  A BOY’S WILL

  “Gimme halfa dollar, Joe, I’m hongry. Gimme halfa dollar, Joe.”

  The Italian gutter G.I. slang whined in a boy’s hoarse voice behind John Godolphin as he walked away from the little chapel where he had spent a morning studying the Byzantine mosaics. After a year in bomb-scarred chaotic Palermo, John Godolphin had learned to ignore the beggars who swarmed importunately along the shabby, once elegant streets. His sensitive soul revolted against poverty and drabness. If these Sicilians were poor it was not his fault. It was a scandal that resident Americans should have this constant strain on their charity.

  “Aw, c’mon, Joe. Gimme halfa buck. I’m hongry.”

  He felt a hand tug tentatively at his sleeve. He swung around in irritation. That was how he first met Sebastiano.

  The boy, who could not have been more than fourteen, was watching him from unblinking dark eyes, soft as wallflower petals. The sturdy, honey-brown body was scantily covered by a tattered G.I. T-shirt and a pair of faded blue shorts. A hand was stretched out—dirty, broken-nailed, quivering with hope.

  Once John saw him, he was no longer conscious of his irritation. For the boy was beautiful—really beautiful. And John Godolphin worshipped Beauty—much, he felt, as the Italian Renaissance painters had once worshipped it. It had been this love of Beauty which had made him buy a villa in Palermo, where he could indulge his frail talent for water colors in a charming milieu of antique palaces and the Countesses’ tea parties, far from the discouraging crudities of his native America. Now all the connoisseur in him responded to Sebastiano.

  “An angel,” thought John Godolphin. Not the insipid Nordic conception of an angel, but a warm-blooded Mediterranean angel who, long before Christianity, might have been a faun.

  “Charity, Signore. For the love of the sacred Maria.”

  The child spoke now in a crooning Italian which dispelled the impertinent impression made by the raffish American slang. John Godolphin’s plump, rather babyish face suffused with smiles. He gave the boy a hundred-lira bill. He noticed, too, that one of the bare knees was scraped and bleeding from a fall. Impulsively he took a handkerchief from his pocket and pressed it into the boy’s hand.

  “You’d better take this, too—for your knee.”

  A blinding smile transfigured Sebastiano’s face. He clutched John’s hand and carried it to his lips.

  “You are my friend, Signore—my friend for eternity.”

  From then on Sebastiano haunted John, bringing a dash of excitement and color to his self-indulgent, almost spinsterish days. The boy’s devotion was touching. He protected John savagely from all the other street beggars and never again asked for money, although John usually gave it to him. Whenever John left the Villa Godolphin in his spruce horse-drawn carriage to visit the old Duquesa or the Palazzo Carduccio, Sebastiano was sure to appear from the anonymity of the slums, racing beside the carriage, smiling his angel’s smile, a hand ready to dart deftly for the tossed bill or the butt of one of John’s specially made Turkish cigarettes.

  Sometimes he had another child with him, a solemn little urchin of nine or ten, whom he called “my pal, Mario.” Once Mario caught the fluttering bill and Sebastiano knocked him down and took it from him. Obscurely, it pleased John Godolphin to know that Sebastiano could hold his own against the pack.

  For the boy had become his pet charity, almost his pet dog.

  And like a dog he was ubiquitous.

  One afternoon John had been lunching at the Palazzo Carduccio and was wandering in the gardens, searching for a subject to sketch as a little present for Teresa Carduccio, when he came upon Rosa, one of the Contessa’s maidservants, cutting fennel in the vegetable patch. The scene made a charming composition and John paused to speak to the girl, hoping to get her to pose for him. But Rosa’s earthy Sicilian mind misinterpreted his interest. Outraging all John’s New England shibboleths, she rose with a shameless smile, and while he clutched his paintbox ineffectually, she twined her arms around him and pressed her soft young lips to his.

  “You want a little love, Signore. All Americans are the same. I will give you love.”

  John pushed her away, his face crimson with embarrassment. But the girl only laughed and came towards him again.

  This was when Sebastiano, the watchdog, appeared from nowhere over the garden wall with little Mario. Screaming ferociously at the girl, Sebastiano drove her off to the kitchen quarters.

  From then on John’s warm feeling for Sebastiano was enhanced by gratitude. But it took him several distracted days to recover from the experience with Rosa. He avoided the Palazzo Carduccio; and the Contessa, who was ignorant of the circumstances, only managed to coax him back with the promise of an irresistibly select little luncheon.

  It was at this party that John Godolphin learned the shocking news of Rosa’s murder.

  The girl had been found stabbed to death with a stiletto in a public park, and all the guests were agog, with the exception of the old Duquesa, who had been a lady-in-waiting to the Queen and concerned herself only with royal scandals.

  “Just a jealous lover,” she exclaimed loftily. “These things are so common in Sicily. So barbarous!”

  But even the Duquesa was interested when Teresa announced that the police had found at the scene a fine initialled linen handkerchief, stained with the girl’s blood. This handkerchief was clearly the property of a “non-barbarous” gentleman.

  The Marquesa Landini, whose sharp tongue was notorious, laughed her caustic laugh and remarked: “There’ll be many distinguished noses quaking as they are blown today.”

  When John Godolphin drove homeward along the dazzling blue waterfront, he felt a little shaken. In the light of what had happened to Rosa, it was fortunate that no one but his “friend for eternity” had witnessed the scene in the vegetable patch. It very well might have been misconstrued. It might have been very awkward indeed.

  John glanced almost wistfully out of the carriage in the hope of seeing Sebastiano among a group of children who were tumbling through some noisy game in the ruins of a luxury hotel. But there was no sign of him.

  John felt depressed. He now looked upon Sebastiano as his good-luck charm. The boy’s absence seemed faintly ominous.

  At the Villa Godolphin tea was ritualistically awaiting him in the baroque splendor of the salon which he so much loved. He was nibbling one of his cook’s inspired Sicilian pastries when the housemaid came in to announce that a boy wanted to see him.

  “A dirty boy, Signore. A beggar. He says he is called Sebastiano.”

  John was both pleased and surprised. Like a timid demigod of the olive orchards, Sebastiano had never before dared to approach the Villa Godolphin itself. It would be charming to entertain him for a little while, to give him one of these delicious cannelonis. He told the maid to send the boy in, and soon Sebastiano appeared in the doorway, his head lowered respectfully.

  John beckoned him to the silver tea tray and told him to select any pastry he wanted. The boy gazed, wide-eyed, at the elegant assortment of food. Cautiously he reached for a little chocolate cake. Once it was actually in his hand, he seemed to gain confidence. He wolfed it down and took another. With the second pastry poised between finger and thumb, he began to move around the room, peering at the pictures and tapestries, delicately caressing John’s scrupulously chosen bric-à-brac. John watched him, enchanted by the natural grace of his movements. At length the boy returned and sat down opposite him on a huge brocade sofa. He smiled his sudden, swooning smile.

  “Nice place you gotta here. Oh, boy!”

  “Please don’t use that horrible English,” said John in Italian. Still smiling, the child leaned back, testing the comfort of the couch. The plump upholstery seemed to delight him. He swung his legs up and lay stretched at full length, his dirty bare feet pressed against a rose-pi
nk silk cushion. He glanced sidewise at John and said in his mellifluous Italian: “It pleases me here. Where I live—very poor. My brothers, my sisters, my father, my mother, all in one little, little room.”

  “That’s too bad,” said John, wishing such subjects need not be broached and worrying now about the silk cushion.

  “Yes,” murmured Sebastiano, wriggling against the upholstery. “It pleases me here. How beautiful!” He threw the angel’s smile again at John. “It would please you to adopt me as your little son?”

  A wild notion, which had come before, entered John’s mind. A beautiful son of his own to mould like a sculptor? The notion collapsed. With a little ironical smile at himself, John knew that his fastidious love for his cushions would always be stronger than any affection he could develop for dirty feet.

  Banteringly, he said: “Wouldn’t it be charming if I could?”

  “A nice bed all the time,” mused Sebastiano. “Lots of food all the time. Lots of sleep.” The boy sat bolt upright. “Shall I begin now? Shall I never go away?”

  “But your parents could never spare you, Sebastiano. You’re joking.”

  The long lashes veiled the child’s eyes in an expression of infinite sadness. “How can I joke when poor Rosa is dead? Poor Rosa who was the fidanzata of my brother Gino?”

  “Rosa?” John’s plump cheeks quivered. “What has Rosa to do with anything?”

  “Ah,” declared Sebastiano, “men are all the same. When I grow up, I will be the same, too. Little Mario and I see you making love with Rosa. You get tired of her. Probably she asks money from you, threatens.” He shrugged. “Women are stupid cows. They deserve what befalls them.”

  “Sebastiano!” cried John.